Ramón Bravo

Ramón Bravo (21 October 1925 – 21 February 1998) was a Mexican diver, photographer and underwater filmmaker. Bravo was born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila in northern Mexico. Bravo was first known as a famous Mexican swimmer and competed in the 1948 Summer Olympics. However, he soon became involved with diving and underwater photography – gaining him fame in both America and Europe as an oceanographer. Bravo developed a fascination for sharks and devoted a large portion of his life to filming and studying sharks. He is widely known for the discovery, study, and photography of "sleeping sharks" near Isla Mujeres in the Caribbean in the 1970s, where tiger sharks were seen there to be “sleeping” on the ocean floor. Bravo served as Jacques Cousteau’s dive guide in the cave of sleeping sharks and reefs surrounding Isla Mujeres.

Also a well-known journalist and writer during the mid-1960s and 1970s; he wrote among others following novels and works:

• Primero y touch, segundo y muerte (1961)
• Bajo las aguas del Mar Rojo (1962)
• Isla Mujeres (1972)
• Holbox (1974)
• Tintorera (1975)
• Buceando entre Tiburones (1975)
• El cenote de la muerte (1976)
• El cisne negro (1976)
• Un tesoro bajo el mar (1977)
• Carnada (1978)
• Buceando en el Polo Norte (1979)
• Un tesoro bajo el mar (1979)
• Buceando entre las Orcas (1982)
• La siesta del tiburón (1984)
• Sirenia (1987)
• El Chinchorro (not completed, about the protected zone of Mahahual)

One of his novels later became a film called Tintorera (1977) directed by René Cardona Jr. The underwater photography was by Ramón Bravo. He also photographed and directed underwater scenes of the James Bond movie Licence to Kill (1989) starring Timothy Dalton.

He died at Isla Mujeres near Cancún, Quintana Roo, México.